For two days, major players in the humanitarian community gathered at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, to discuss the current state of international aid and to call for change. It didn’t receive much attention, but a major focus of the summit was the involvement of youth in humanitarian responses. While many countries sent youth delegates and the summit featured a separate youth forum, No Lost Generation at The George Washington University was the only student-run organization invited to share our work as part of an exhibition fair at the summit. I traveled to Istanbul with six other GW students to participate.

On behalf of the broader UN community, WFP and UNICEF facilitated the first Data Innovation Lab workshop at technology think tank Singularity University to harness the power of digital growth and the data revolution for sustainable development.

As an engineer for the World Food Programme, no two days are ever the same for Sogol Akef. From constructing roads in Afghanistan to rebuilding communities following a disaster, she tells us what inspired her to choose this line of work and how she got there.

When a natural disaster hits, the impact is inevitable and usually leaves in its path high levels of destruction with long-term consequences. The better a country is prepared, the better it will respond to help its population to cope with the effects of a hurricane, a drought or an earthquake.

Bhawana Upadhyay is standing knee-deep in IT equipment in a wooden hut on the outskirts of Stuttgart waiting to roleplay her socks off as part of OpEx Bravo, an intensive disaster simulation exercise organized by the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC), led by WFP.